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INVISIBLE UNTRANSLATABILITY AND PHILOSOPHY
KATHRYN BATCHELOR
The subtitle of the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies, ‘dictionnaire des
intraduisibles’, links the publication to the issue of untranslatability that has
accompanied discussions of translation throughout history; Andrew Chesterman even
goes so far as to identify untranslatability as one of the five ‘supermemes’ of
translation.1 This problematization of the very possibility of translation, and the issues
that it pushes to the fore, becomes particularly acute when considered in conjunction
with another issue on which scholarly attention has recently focussed, namely that of
translation invisibility. This latter notion – associated primarily with the writings of
Lawrence Venuti – refers to the general tendency to overlook the fact of a text’s
translation; to read a text as if it were the original, and to ignore the inevitable
differences that are introduced through the act of translation. In this paper, I shall
outline recent thinking on the issue of untranslatability as it relates specifically to
philosophy, examining the implications of the translation of untranslatables,
particularly in terms of how the relationship between originals and translations is
conceived. I shall also assess the extent to which invisibility is truly an issue in
relation to translations of philosophical texts, and explore the inevitable dissonance
that arises if a transparent relationship between philosophical translations and their
originals is assumed.
Translation scholars have tended to align themselves into two camps with
regard to their thinking on translatability. Some, such as Ortega y Gasset, writing in
1937, argue that translation is in itself impossible, by definition a ‘utopian task’.2
Similar lines of argument continue to be put forward by translation scholars today:
Paul Ricoeur, for example, devotes a third of his recent volume, Sur la traduction to the notion of untranslatability, taking the view that translation is characterized both by
‘un intraduisible de départ’,3 linked to the inherent heterogeneity of languages, and by an ‘intraduisible terminal’,4 the unavoidable betrayal operated by translation, and which means that translation should be viewed as an act of ‘construction du comparable’ rather than as restitution of meaning.5 The second camp limits the notion of untranslatability to certain types of translation, or rather to the translation of certain types of text, most notably literary and particularly poetic ones. Roman Jakobson, for example, states that ‘poetry by definition is untranslatable’,6 a view that is famously echoed in the cliché generally attributed to Robert Frost, ‘poetry is what gets lost in translation’. What critics such as Jakobson are pointing to when they argue the untranslatability of poetry are not specific words or expressions that poets are likely to use, but rather to the way in which poets use language, exploiting as they do the intrinsic sound properties of words, and creating meaning by many indirect routes rather than by relying on the established conventional connections between words and their semantic contents. As Juliane House summarizes, ‘in a poetic-aesthetic
[elsewhere ‘form-oriented’] work of art, the usual distinction between form and content (or meaning) no longer holds. [...] Since the physical nature of signifiers in one language can never be duplicated in another language, the relations of signifiers to signified, which are no longer arbitrary in a poetic-aesthetic work, cannot be expressed in another language’.7
Although not all philosophical texts can be viewed as heavily form-focused, the relevance of this type of untranslatability to the work of a number of philosophers is clear, and has been discussed in some depth by the translators of those works. Alan
Bass, for example, highlights some of the translatorial challenges that he faced when translating Derrida’s L’Ecriture et la différence: The question arises – and it is a serious one – whether these essays can be read in a language other than French [...] Derrida always writes with close attention to the resonances and punning humor of etymology. Occasionally, when the Greek and Latin inheritances of English coincide, this aspect of Derrida’s style can be captured; more often it requires [...] laborious annotation [...] The translator, constantly aware of what he is sacrificing, is often tempted to use a language that is a compromise between English as we know it and English as he would like it to be in order to capture as much of the original text as possible.8 Gayatri Spivak, translator of Derrida’s De la grammatologie, also describes the challenges posed by the linguistic complexities of Derrida’s writing:
Denying the uniqueness of words, their substantiality, their transferability, their repeatability, Of Grammatology denies the possibility of translation. Not so paradoxically perhaps, each twist of phrase becomes at the same time ‘significant’ and playful when language is manipulated for the purpose of putting signification into question, for deconstructing the binary opposition ‘signifier-signified’. That playfulness I fear I have not been able remotely to capture.9 As these translators observe, it is not only specific terms and expressions used by
Derrida that are untranslatable, but rather his method of writing as a whole, the intricate relationship between the exploration of the French language and the development of philosophical thought which renders his texts – like other ‘poetic- aesthetic’ texts – untranslatable.
Similar translation difficulties apply to a number of German philosophers, most notably Hegel and Heidegger. As Michael Inwood argues, the complexity of Hegel’s use of language makes his work very difficult to study in translation:
The intricacies of Hegel’s German are difficult for a German-speaker to unravel. But the difficulties are multiplied for the English-speaker. A significant German word often has a range of meaning and use to which no single English word exactly corresponds [...] Even if a German word has an acceptable English equivalent, its history and (real or supposed etymology) are likely to differ from those of the English word: no translation can subject ‘judge’ and ‘judgement’ to the manoeuvres that urteilen and Urteil undergo in Hegel’s hands.10 The significance of this type of translation difficulty to Hegel’s work goes beyond the links between a word and its etymology, extending to the very act of philosophizing itself. One of the themes that emerges most strongly through Hegel’s work is that it is the means, not the end, that is his philosophy, or, as David Lamb puts it:
Merely to ask for his [the philosopher’s] conclusions, as one would ask an economist, physician, engineer, and so on, is to miss the whole point of philosophy. The objective, or goal, is expressed in the road upon which one travels towards the destination, but there is no ultimate destination for the road is circular; it is infinite.11 The words which Hegel uses thus become part of the very process that is philosophy; according to this view of philosophy, the philosopher should, as Inwood summarizes,
‘watch words developing their own senses rather than arbitrarily declare that he intends to use them in such and such a way’.12
This aspect of untranslatability in philosophy, which relates to the very process and manner of writing and has much in common with the untranslatability of poetic or form-focused texts, differs from the untranslatability of poetry in one important respect. Whereas the translation problems relating to poetry are usually confined to the translation of a particular poem, or set of poems, form-focused untranslatability in philosophy results in complex, multi-layered terms that often come to form important elements in the philosopher’s argument, and are subsequently taken up and discussed by other philosophers. It is these terms that – in considerable part, at least – are the concern of the Vocabulaire, and for which Cassin coins the term
‘un intraduisible’: Nous sommes quelques-uns, philosophes / philologues / traducteurs [...] à travailler ensemble pour confectionner ce que nous appelons entre nous un Dictionnaire des intraduisibles. [...] ces intraduisibles ont été, sont et seront constamment traduits : « intraduisible » est là seulement pour dire le degré de difficulté qu’on endure à rendre certains mots et réseaux (des météores : kairos, concetto, desengano, des traînées d’histoire : Gelassenheit ... ; des poids lourds : conscience/conscience, consciousness Bewußtsein, Gewissen [...])13 Like the Vocabulaire, translations of philosophical texts tend to focus on the untranslatability of the specific words or expressions that arise out of the original writing process, rather than on the untranslatability of the mode of writing itself. Alan
Bass’s introduction to his translation of Derrida’s L’Ecriture et la différance, for example, stresses the need for the translation to be accompanied, ideally, by a detailed commentary explaining some of the multiple meanings of specific terms used by
Derrida, highlighting the ‘close attention [paid by Derrida] to the resonances and punning humour of etymology’.14 In this introduction, Bass provides a translation of a note from L’Ecriture et la différance, inserting Derrida’s original French terms in brackets after the English translation, and highlighting relevant intertextual and semantic connections. The bracketed additions expand the translated passage by no less than two hundred words (the passage itself is less than one hundred words long in translation). Although Bass concedes that it would be impossible to translate the entire text in this way, his translation approach seeks, in the main, to follow this strategy, identifying and expounding those points where the extra layers of meaning that are present in the original are of great importance, and according to Kathleen
Davies, supplying more translation notes than any of Derrida’s other translators.15
This technique of supplementing the translation with bracketed glosses, or with the original source language terms, is one that Derrida himself uses when translating excerpts from Hegel in his essay ‘Le puits et la pyramide’, as the following extract illustrates:
Le procès du signe est une Aufhebung. Ainsi : « L’intuition, en tant qu’elle est d’abord immédiatement un donné (ein Gegebenes) et une spatialité (ein Räumliches), reçoit, pour autant qu’on l’utilise comme signe, la détermination essentielle d’être seulement en tant que aufgehobene [‘c’est-à- dire à la fois élevée et supprimée, disons désormais relevée, au sens où l’on peut être à la fois élevé et relevé de ses fonctions, remplacé dans une sorte de promotion par ce qui succède et prend la relève. En ce sens, le signe est la relève de l’intuition sensible-spatiale]. L’intelligence en est la négativité. (§ 459) ».16 A similar approach to the complexity of Hegel’s language is taken by
Alexandre Kojève, who supplements his translation of Hegel’s Phenomenologie des
Geistes with lengthy commentary. The excerpt below, for example, which is a translation of a paragraph that is just fifty-eight words long, runs to over one hundred and seventy words, much of which consists of Kojève’s glosses of Hegel’s terms:
Ce concept pur de la reconnaisance, c’est-à-dire du redoublement de la Conscience-de-soi à l’intérieur de son unité, doit être considéré maintenant dans l’aspect sous lequel son évolution apparaît à la Conscience-de-soi. [C’est-à-dire non pas au philosophe qui en parle, mais à l’homme conscient de soi qui reconnaît un autre homme ou se fait reconnaître par lui.] Cette évolution rendra d’abord manifeste l’aspect de l’inégalité des deux Consciences-de-soi [c’est-à-dire des deux hommes qui s’affrontent en vue de la reconnaissance.] Ou, en d’autres termes, elle rendra manifeste l’expansion du moyen-terme [qui est la reconnaissance mutuelle et réciproque] dans les deux points-extrêmes [qui sont les deux qui s’affrontent] ; ceux-ci, pris en tant que points-extrêmes, sont opposés l’un à l’autre et, par conséquent, tels que l’un est uniquement entité-reconnue, et l’autre – uniquement entité-reconnaissante. [Au prime abord, l’homme qui veut se faire reconnaître par un autre ne veut nullement le reconnaître à son tour. S’il réussit, la reconnaissance ne sera donc pas mutuelle et réciproque : il sera reconnu mais ne reconnaîtra pas celui qui le reconnaît.]17 While these translations represent the more extreme end of a translation approach which deals with untranslatables by adding bracketed explanations – indeed, in these cases, the translation might be argued to be part of the critic’s exposition of the original text, rather than simply a translation – many translators approach philosophical untranslatability in this way, focussing essentially on the untranslatability of specific terms, rather than on that of the original writing process more generally. An alternative approach, which seeks to represent, in the target language, the actual process of thought development and its close alignment with the source language, is illustrated by Gayatri Spivak, translator of Derrida’s De la grammatologie. As Kathleen Davies argues, Spivak attempts to reproduce much of the play of Derrida’s original text, moving away from ‘fluent’ English in order to do so:
Spivak’s text [...] is sometimes noted for its mannered or strained English (Rée 1996; Gallop 1994). Her unusual rendering of De la grammatologie with Of Grammatology, ‘suggesting “a piece of” as well as “about”’ (Spivak 74: lxxxvi), and which she retained against ‘expert counsel’, offers just one obvious example. This atypical English calls attention to its own performance so that –even if Spivak has not fully captured Derrida’s playful signifying of the question of signification – her language attends both to its own disseminative textuality and its own susceptibility to questioning.18 Spivak’s use of ‘atypical English [which] calls attention to its own performance’ might be argued to be close to the type of translation approach explored by Phillip Lewis in an essay originally entitled ‘Vers la traduction abusive’. Here,
Lewis addresses the question of whether, with regard to French texts by Derrida, and for translators for whom a detailed commentary is not an option, ‘anything can be done in translation to preserve the tenor or texture or tangents of the French that English would override’.19 He seeks to do this by asking how Derrida himself would
‘deal with the risk and necessity of infidelity’.20 Taking as his starting point Derrida’s translation of the Heideggerian term Entziehung as retrait, Lewis argues the abusive nature of such a translation, which occasions ‘a kind of controlled textual disruption’,21 and asks whether this kind of translation can be taken as a model, such that one might develop ‘a kind of abuse principle’.22 This kind of translation would be one that ‘values experimentation, tampers with usage, seeks to match the polyvalencies or plurivocities or expressive stresses of the original by producing its own’.23 As such, it would often have recourse to atypical variations in the target language, of the kind used by Spivak, and would conform to what Lewis terms a ‘new axiomatics of fidelity, one that requires attention to the chain of signifiers, to syntactic processes, to discursive structures, to the incidence of language mechanisms on thought and reality formation’.24
The type of translation approach outlined by Lewis and illustrated to some degree in Spivak’s Of Grammatology can be said to go some way to ‘translating’ the process of philosophizing, re-enacting the creative and reflective paths taken by the original philosophers and which, as argued above, form an integral part of their actual philosophies. Inevitably, those creative and reflective paths will be altered rather than simply replicated. To some extent, alteration can be argued to be an inevitable part of any translation, or, as Jonathan Ree argues: ‘There is no translation without interpretation [...] and since the possibilities of interpretation are never exhausted, it follows that no translation can ever be final’.25 Derrida himself makes a similar point in his discussion of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Task of the Translator’: ‘S’il y a bien entre texte traduit et texte traduisant un rapport d’“original” à version, il ne saurait être représentatif ou reproductif. La traduction n’est ni une image ni une copie.’26 Although Derrida, Benjamin and others view these changes positively – Benjamin famously stating that ‘the life of the originals attains in them [the translations] to its ever-renewed latest and most abundant flowering’27 – the more popular view of this inevitability of change is usually couched in negative terms. (Numerous, for example, are the reviews and articles using the term ‘lost in translation’, while very few refer to
‘gain in translation’.) As far as the translation of philosophy is concerned, however, a more positive interpretation of the changes wrought through translation would seem appropriate, particularly if philosophy is viewed as open-ended dialogue rather than the pursuit of one ultimate truth. At this point it is perhaps useful to recall an argument formulated by Hegel to demonstrate the unreasonableness of those who would show contempt for philosophy because of its plurality; the same argument might easily be adapted for translation, as illustrated by the altered quotation below:
Would anyone, who wished for fruit, reject cherries, pears or grapes, on the ground that they were cherries, pears or grapes, and not fruit? But when philosophy [translation] is in question, the excuse of many is that philosophies [translations] are so different, and none of them is the philosophy [translation] – that each is only a philosophy [translation]. Such a plea is assumed to justify any amount of contempt for philosophy [translation]. And yet cherries too are fruit.28 If, as Lamb argues, ‘the activity of philosophy is that of a continuing conversation’,29 then the translation of philosophy, with all the alterations and new reflections that it entails, can be viewed positively as a contributor to ongoing philosophical dialogue.
A similar point is argued by Spivak in relation to translating Derrida’s De la grammatologie:
If there are no unique words, if, as soon as a privileged concept-word emerges, it must be given over to the chain of substitutions and to the ‘common language’, why should that act of substitution that is translation be suspect? If the proper name or sovereign status of the author is as much a barrier as a right of way, why should the translator’s position be secondary?30 To return to the Vocabulaire, this dynamic view of the possibilities occasioned by the untranslatability of terms and texts fits in with Cassin’s description of the
‘intraduisible’ as ‘ce que l’on ne cesse pas de (ne pas) traduire’.31 Far from being problematic, untranslatability, in this view, can be seen as a powerful impetus for renewal, the ongoing development of philosophical thought. The problematic nature of untranslatability only returns when the second of the notions evoked in the title of this paper comes into play, namely the invisibility of translation.
The notion of translation invisibility came to prominence through the writings of Lawrence Venuti, and notably through his history of translation entitled The
Translator’s Invisibility. In general terms, Venuti argues, contemporary Anglo-
American culture has a disdain for translation and for the translated text, viewing it as inferior, secondary, derivative. As a consequence, publishers tend to downplay the fact of a text’s translation, such that translated texts are often presented as if they were originally written in English, and the issue of potential differences between an original and its translation tends to be overlooked. In a later publication, The
Scandals of Translation, Venuti argues that this phenomenon extends to the area of philosophy, not only within Anglo-American cultures, but also in Continental traditions:
In philosophical research widespread dependence on translated texts coincides with neglect of their translated status, a general failure to take into account the differences introduced by the fact of translation [...] Even in Continental traditions like existential phenomenology and poststructuralism, where language is viewed as constitutive of thought and translating can more readily be seen as determining the domestic significance of the foreign text – even here philosophical argument and speculation give only passing acknowledgement to their reliance on translations. Philosophy has long engaged in the creation of concepts by interpreting domestic versions of foreign texts, but for the most part these versions have been taken as transparent, and the concepts unmediated by the domestic language and culture that is their medium.32 Taking the reception of G.E.M. Anscombe’s translation of Wittegenstein’s
Philosophical Investigations as an example, Venuti argues that most reviewers concentrated on ‘critical expositions of Wittgenstein’s ideas and arguments’, and that
‘they quoted from the English version as if he wrote it, as if it were a simple communication of his intended meaning’.33 This tendency to treat translated versions of philosophical texts as identical to the original texts is undoubtedly widespread, both within society in general and within academic institutions more specifically. To some extent, however, Venuti’s arguments concerning the neglect of the translated status of philosophical texts can be tempered by considering the paratextual aspects of the translated texts themselves. While philosophical texts aimed at non-academic audiences do indeed tend to play down the fact that they are – or are based on - translations,34 those aimed at academic audiences generally draw the reader’s attention to their status as translations through a translator’s note or preface and a significant number of translation notes in the main body of the text.
A comparative study of one philosophical text for which a large number of translations exist, namely Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft, reveals that the level of visibility of the fact of translation in the English versions is not less now than it was a hundred and fifty years ago – if anything, it has perhaps increased. J. M. D.
Meiklejohn’s 1860 translation, for example, does not include the name of the translator on the outer cover, contains a translator’s preface that is just four pages long, and includes few translation notes in the text itself. Werner Pluhar’s 1996 translation, while also avoiding naming the translator on the outer cover and including a translator’s preface of a similar length to Meiklejohn’s, is, to use Pluhar’s own words, ‘copiously annotated’,35 with approximately six translation notes per page; it also contains a glossary of German-English terms. Another recent translation, that by
Paul Guyer & Allen W. Wood, names the translators on the outer cover, includes a four page ‘note on translation’ at the end of a much longer introduction, and contains a substantial number of footnotes and endnotes linking English terms to their German originals and referring readers to information that might help them interpret the text.
The visibility of translation in this latter publication is further increased by the marketing of the text: the CUP website’s introduction to the series of which the Guyer
& Wood translation forms part states that ‘the purpose of the Cambridge Edition is to offer scrupulously accurate translations of the best modern German editions of Kant's work in a uniform format suitable for both Kant scholars and students’.36 This increase in visibility over time is, however, by no means clear-cut: the longest translator’s preface is in the 1896 translation by Max Müller, and runs to fifty-five pages; this translation also presents the name of the translator on the outer cover. Of the nine translations surveyed, it is the 1952 Encyclopaedia Britannica collection of
Kant’s writings (which includes Meiklejohn’s translation of the Critique) that is the most invisible: neither the outer nor the inner cover state that the texts are translated, and none of the original translators’ prefaces or notes accompanying the text remain.
The only reference to the fact of the texts’ translated status is to be found in the table of contents, which gives the names of the translators under the titles of Kant’s work included in the volume. The low visibility of translation in this volume can, however, almost certainly be attributed to the fact that its target audience is non-academic, confirming the tendency outlined above.37 This survey of translations of Kant’s Kritik suggests that, even if lecturers or supervisors make no mention of the issue of translation, it should be clear to a limited extent to researchers and students who access texts through these editions. The problem remains, however, that many readers of philosophy – particularly undergraduates and general readers, less so postgraduate or postdoctoral readers – do not come to philosophical writers through full texts, but rather through anthologies or other collections of textual excerpts. These representations of the original texts rarely make mention of their translated status, suggesting an ease of accessibility to the meaning(s) of the original text that ignores the inevitable interpretations and alterations that are a result of its translation into another language. Even anthologies with an academic target audience, such as the Western Philosophy an Anthology, edited by John Cottingham (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2007), make only minimal reference to the fact of translation, in the form of footnotes giving bibliographical details of the full publications. Cottingham’s short introduction to Hegel’s The
Philosophy of Right, for example, makes reference to the fact that ‘the language Hegel uses can be off-putting’, but does not differentiate between Hegel’s language as represented in the anthology in translation and Hegel’s original German.38
Philosophical translations available via the internet show a similar tendency to minimise the fact that they are translations, thereby indicating a transparent relationship to the original texts that is deeply problematic. The largest collection of
Hegel texts online, for example, the Hegel by Hypertext project on the Marxists
Internet Archive,39 limits its reference to the texts’ translated status to bibliographical information given in small print at the bottom of the list of contents in the left-hand side of the screen (the selected part of the text itself appearing in the main window), and omits the translators’ prefaces and notes included in the printed editions of the translations. The Meiklejohn translation of Kant’s Critique, which is available online through both marxists.org and Project Gutenberg,40 appears similarly denuded of its translation preface and notes in both online reproductions. The increased invisibility of translations on the internet is not only problematic for the reasons outlined above, but represents, in my view, something of a missed opportunity. The very medium of the internet, with its potential for creating hyperlinks between documents or for viewing more than one text side-by-side, together with its advanced search functions, would appear to offer the ideal environment for representing translations visibly.
Readers might, for example, access more than one translation of the same text at the same time, prohibiting any notion of translation as transparent or in any way definitive; translators would be able to present multiple solutions to translation problems, or to increase the number of notes accompanying the text – options that the cost of printed works inevitably rules out. Through the medium of the internet, the translated text can stand with, rather than for the original text, allowing translation to be conceptualised in metonymic, as opposed to metaphoric, terms. This would enable us, as Maria Tymoczko argues, to see translations as ‘not merely replacements or substitutions but new textures, new constructions’,41 or, in other words, as contributors to the ongoing dialogues of philosophy, as argued above. A metonymic conceptualisation of translation will inevitably be one that prioritises visibility of translation, disrupting assumptions of straightforward transparency between original and translated text, and transforming untranslatable terms from obstructions into loci of opportunity.
These opportunities, Cassin suggests, lie in the realm of communication – true communication that grapples with difference, rather than eliding it – and form a crucial part of her political vision: Il [le Vocabulaire] regarde vers l’avenir plutôt que vers le passé : il n’est pas lié à une Europe rétrospective et chosifiée [...] définie par un cumul d’héritages juxtaposés qui renforcerait les particularismes, mais à une Europe en cours, en activité, energia plutôt que ergon, qui travaille les écarts, les tensions, les transferts, les appropriations, les contresens, pour mieux se fabriquer.42 What this paper suggests is that if philosophical untranslatables are to have positive outworkings of the kind identified by Cassin, the gaps and tensions must remain. Or, to put it another way, visibility of translation is an absolute prerequisite if untranslatability is to be viewed not as a hindrance, blocking successful or complete communication, but rather as a positive, creative force, ‘seule manière de faciliter réellement la communication entre les langues et les cultures’.43
Notes
1. Andrew Chesterman, Memes of Translation, (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1997), p.10. Chesterman is using the sociobiological term ‘meme’ to refer to ‘ideas and conventions that survive many generations, and are successfully transmitted from one culture to another’; ‘supermemes’ are ‘ideas of such pervasive influence that they come up again and again in the history of [translation]’. See Memes of Translation p.7-8. 2. José Ortega y Gasset, ‘The Misery and Splendour of Translation’, translated by Elizabeth Gamble Miller, in The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 49-63 (p.49). 3. Paul Ricoeur, Sur la traduction, (Paris: Bayard, 2004), p.53. 4. ibid. p.56 5. ibid. p.66 6. Roman Jakobson, ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translating’, in The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 113-118 (p.118). 7. Juliane House, Translation Quality Assessment, (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1997), p.48. 8. Alan Bass, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in Writing and Difference by Jacques Derrida, translated by Alan Bass, (London: Routledge, 1978), pp. ix-xx (p. xiv). 9. Gayatri Spivak, ‘Translator’s Preface’, in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Spivak, (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1974) pp.ix-lxxxviii (p.lxxxvi). 10. Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p.16-17. 11. David Lamb, Language and Perception in Hegel and Wittgenstein (Amersham: Avebury), p.99 12. Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p.14. 13. Barbara Cassin, ‘Avant-propos’ in Rue Descartes 14. De l’intraduisible en philosophie, (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995) pp. 9-10 (p.9). 14. Alan Bass, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in Writing and Difference by Jacques Derrida, translated by Alan Bass, (London: Routledge, 1978), pp. ix-xx (p.xiv). 15. See Kathleen Davies, Deconstruction and Translation, (Manchester: St Jerome Press, 2001), p.74. 16. Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie,(Paris: Minuit, 1972), p.102. 17. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), pp. 16-17. 18. Kathleen Davies, Deconstruction and Translation, (Manchester: St Jerome Press, 2001), p.72. 19. Philip E. Lewis, ‘The Measure of Translation Effects’, in The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 264-283 (p.268). 20. ibid., p.269. 21. ibid. 22. ibid. 23. ibid., p.270. 24. ibid. 25. Jonathan Ree, ‘The Translation of Philosophy’, New Literary History 32 (2001), 223-257 (p.224). 26. Jacques Derrida, ‘Des Tours de Babel’, in Difference in Translation, edited by Joseph F. Graham, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 209-248 (p.224). 27. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, translated by Harry Zohn, in The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 15-25 (p.17). 28. G.W.F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, translated by William Wallace, available on ‘Hegel by Hypertext’: << http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/index.htm >> [accessed 18th November 2009], part 1, paragraph 13. My brackets. 29. David Lamb, Language and Perception in Hegel and Wittgenstein (Amersham: Avebury), p.79. 30. Gayatri Spivak, ‘Translator’s Preface’, in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Spivak, (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1974) pp.ix-lxxxviii (p.lxxxvi). 31. Barbara Cassin, ‘Présentation’ in Vocabulaire européen des philosophies, edited by Barbara Cassin, (Paris : Seuil/Le Robert, 2004), pp.xvii-xxii (p.xvii). 32. Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation (London: Routledge, 1998), p.106. 33. ibid., p.107. 34. Such publications include the ‘For Beginners’ series, which present the ideas of individual philosophers in comic book format, and teach yourself philosophy in the ‘teach yourself’ series. In Heidegger for Beginners, for example, the back cover blurb makes reference to Heidegger’s identity as a German philosopher, but the text makes no overt reference to the fact that it relies on translation. In teach yourself philosophy, the chapter devoted to Continental Philosophy includes citations from a number of European philosophers, but, again, makes no reference to the fact that they are translated. It might be argued that the lack of reference to translation in these texts is to a large extent irrelevant, given that they are highly condensed and interpreted versions of the original texts in any case. 35. Werner Pluhar, ‘Translator’s Preface’, in Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant, translated by Werner Pluhar, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), pp. xvii-xxiii, (p.xxi). 36. See << http://www.cambridge.org/uk/series/sSeries.asp?code=CWIK >> [accessed 21st November 2009]. Interestingly, this marketing strategy was subsequently criticised by Marcus Weigelt in the introduction to his 2007 Penguin translation of the Critique: Weigelt argues that ‘the Guyer/Wood translation is not the definitive translation and edition of Kant’s Critique that it was marketed as, if only because it is littered with a sinister number of errors, among many others the confusion of “appearance” with “intuition” on at least thirty occasions’ (Marcus Weigelt, ‘Introduction’, in Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant, translated by Marcus Weigelt (London: Penguin, 2007), p.xv-lxix, (p.lxvi). 37. Further strength is given to this argument by the 1993 Everyman revised edition of the Meiklejohn translation, which includes a very short, single paragraph note on the translation. See Critique of Pure Reason, a revised and expanded translation based on Meiklejohn, by Immanurl Kant, edited by Vasilis Politis, (London: Dent, 1993). 38. See John Cottingham (ed.), Western Philosophy. An Anthology (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2007), p.653. 39. See << http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/index.htm >> [accessed 21 November 2009]. 40. See << http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/reason/critique-of-pure-reason.htm >> [accessed 21 November 2009] and <